"Dont expect too much from a teacher."
More aptly earlier in that scene: "Hey, you wanna get a beer and a pizza?"
That eyepatch can't hide the fact that deep down Nicholas Ray is just a dude from Wisconsin, USA.
Sigh. I think if I tried to make my wife watch this it'd be the kind of film that could end a marriage
One of the things that strikes me immediately and for very long stretches of We Can't Go Home Again is the presentation. This is a film shot on a variety of formats - 8mm, 16mm, I'd be surprised if 35mm but why not, maybe an old bolex or a Viewmaster at a few points I'm sure - and it's shown on the screen inside of a frame that takes up 80% od the 1:33:1 square screen we are watching the film as a whole (it is framed on three sides by like an image of a city landscape and then it moves to a barn once or twice). Inside of this frame there's lots of split screen and other times it's just one scene or image or splinter of a scene in a side of the frame. In other words, it is a splintered and disorientating experience to watch this by design, as this is a filmmaker in Nicholas Ray in his 70s who had less than zero fucks to give.
At the same time, the daring of the approach is tiring, not to mention that this has only the vaguest sense of a narrative as it involves Ray as a film teacher of some note (a "version" of himself with an eyepatch, because it adds to the personality of a persnickity director I suppose) who is leading his students through an experimental film production where they gave to grapple with the turn of the late 60s into the 70s (Chicago in 68 of course is a touchstone for Ray, whether he was actually there I don't know and the movie is cagey about it), and we also get to see some of the relationships of the cast and crew, together and with Ray, as life and art bleed together. And when I say bleed, I mean it's the kind of jumble that will make anyone who isn't already a die-hard, long in the tooth cinephile the sweats.
(I picture myself during times like these like Tim Meadows in Walk Hard watching this on Tubi in my underwear as you come in and I bellow: No! You don't want no part of this!)
And the thing is, I dig an experimental quagmire of a production if a) it has some self awareness of itself to not take itself top seriously, and b) it can stop for just a minute to let the audience breathe. Of course it's hard not to think of the experiments Orson Welles was concocting at the time like with Other Side of the Wind in particular - a film, like this one, that only screened vaguely in one unfinished form before it's director's passing and then completed years later, as this came out officially in 2011 - which also had Dennis Hopper and who, according to trivia, was in contact with his former Rebel without a Cause director while he made The Last Movie (which looks like a classical Howard Hawks Western by comparison). But I also thought of Brian de Palma and his experiments both before (Greetings, Dionysus 69) and after (Home Movies) Ray was making his miasma with his class.
Actually Home Movies (1979) is a good basis of comparison because that was also an attempt to push filmmaking into a more collective and wholly educational effort (De Palma at Sarah Lawrence, Ray at Bighampton SUNY for two years), where instead of learning the same theory and having exercises that might not be seen anywhere after a semester, to come together and actually go through the process of making a full film. But where De Palma managed to get his crew and writers to come up with a....coherent plot, even in the scope of a cheeky satire, there is so much in We Can't Go Home Again in the visual information that you can't get a handle on things.
This leads me back to my earlier Presentation mention and an odd moment midway through the film (49 minutes to be exact) where suddenly... the frame holding in the main box we have been seeing the fragments of film and dual-and-triple screen projection goes away and we get a simple full screen image where Ray and a student walk and talk together (asking for the beer and pizza and talking some various things). The sound is screwed up and not synced right, which is also a problem at other points where it's not intentional and seems more sloppy than like a statement, but it feels like a real moment between two people, which is very scattershot in the rest of the run time. It made me wonder why Ray, whether he had full control over the edit we are even seeing or not, went the route of the multiple images within the frame to start with.
Maybe it is meant to reflect how we see things in our memory, or how splintered the turn of the 60s into the 70s made life for young people especially against an establishment of "pigs" (a group Ray made several films about over his years, about holding on to that youth and how that act can tear people apart to borrow James Dean's phrase). The film isn't without some arresting moments like the flashes of graphic nudity, or the guy cutting off his beard hair and the ugliness of that act. And when Ray tries to keep focus on a scene with interactions between the film students and/or himself, the editing within these scenes you can actually follow things moment to moment.
But so much of the film is preachy when it makes any sense, except for Ray (who carries this natural weariness on film), none of these actors are not much to write home about and I can't stress enough how confounding the way 90% of this film is presented makes me wonder if it is a genuine push for radical explorations of images and ideas or if Ray just didn't think the shots looked good enough mostly in full frame and this obfuscated it. Maybe if it had simply been a short film, even as a longish short at 40 minutes, Ray could get to explore in a tighter frame of mind. So much of this is rambling nonsense, and not much fun. You feel like these young people (and/or Ray) are coming up with things to say and bits of business with nowhere to go.
It pains me to give this a low rating the final (solo) completed film by such a great director of films of the 1950s, one of the mavericks who worked in the system and smuggled in a whole darker and richly melodramatic sensibility into his work, but I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed watching this. Fascinating in spots, perhaps, but the ending especially left a sour taste in my mouth (even as it finally does open up again to full frame one more time).
